Queer Failure Research Articles

Flâneuserie of "In Treatment"’s Laila Green:

The Parisian flâneur is a figure whose indulgent urban loitering is shaped by straight white male privilege. In contrast, this essay introduces the concept of the Blackqueer flâneuse, highlighting the radical imagination’s role in maneuvering through heavily surveilled and controlled spaces. By weaving together intersecting theories of waywardness (Hartman) and willfulness (Ahmed), it examines Black flâneuserie —both as an imaginative and tangible mode of mobility— that ingeniously subverts or sidesteps the violence of capture. Focusing on Laila Green, from the series In Treatment (2021), the essay unveils her outlaw imagination, her yearning for liberation, and her everyday practices of wandering as alternative expressions of flâneuserie. Employing the concept of queer failure (Halberstam), the analysis frames Laila’s persistent attempts at escape alongside her history of facing setbacks as a practice of flâneuserie. With the help of critical geography (de Certeau, Tuan, Cosgrove, Cosgrove and Dora) and Jungian theory, it conceptualizes Laila’s passion for high places and mountains and ultimately the realization of her passion as evidence of her individuation. Akin to the paradoxes of white male flânerie, Black flâneuserie in Laila’s case unfolds as a paradoxical journey of self-discovery, complicated by her privilege and the entanglements of her wanderings within the logic of racial capitalism.

Who Counts? Care, Disability, and the Questionnaire in Jesse Ball'sCensus.

In the Biopolitics of Disability, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2015) assert that disabled people are subjected to endless health and government questionnaires that harvest their data in exchange for better care. As disability advocates such as the National Disability Rights Network (2021) have demonstrated, these questionnaires-like the 2020 census-are highly flawed because disabled populations are not asked to shape the questions that will determine government funding and access to medical care. Although data collection is a source of contemporary literary and scholarly interest, few works explore this in the context of disability. However, Jesse Ball's 2018 novel Census examines questionnaires, specifically the census, and illuminates how narratives of disability are warped by the faulty data these objects collect. I argue that the protagonist, a dying father whose son has Down syndrome and requires full-time care, uses what Jack Halberstam calls "queer failure" to create a more equitable census that will make possible the kinds of care disabled populations deserve. Rather than create a perfect, objective questionnaire, the father skews the questions and data to center disability in the story of America, as he moves away from recording everyone's experiences and instead highlights the lives of disabled people, their caretakers, and their systems of care (doctors, neighbors, etc.). I suggest that this "failed" census reveals those networks and systems of interdependency that scholars like Judith Butler (2020) and advocates such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) posit would radically change how care is approached, thus rendering the census as an object of care.

Sufficient Tragedy: Masculinity as Cruel Optimism in Beowulf

ABSTRACT This article offers a new framework for approaching masculinity in Beowulf by suggesting that masculinity is dependent upon what affect theorist Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”: when an individual pursues something that is an obstacle to their flourishing. This article traces how Beowulf constructs a “masculine economy” sustained by a cruel optimistic attachment to an ideal and unobtainable masculinity, taking the flyting contest between Unferð and Beowulf (ll. 499–558) as an illustrative example of how homosocial competitions that promise masculinity are just as likely to unravel it. This article then examines Beowulf’s defeat and death (ll. 2711b–2820), to demonstrate that failure is intrinsic to cruel optimism. By examining the subversive possibilities of what Jack Halberstam calls “queer failure”, this reading raises questions about whether Beowulf the poem criticises and Beowulf the man refuses the cruelty of masculine striving.

Art of Failure: Soni Kum’s Morning Dew Project and Diasporic Aesthetics

Abstract To date, one of the first video artworks by and about Zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in Japan), Zainichi artist Soni Kum’s three-channel video work Morning Dew (2020) is based on her interviews with sixteen Zainichi Koreans who went to North Korea during the repatriation project (1959–1984) and came back to Japan, and their descendants. I argue that Morning Dew, deliberately fails to give a coherent Zainichi representation, and in doing so, locates Zainichi experience in a context of the global diaspora, especially through the incongruent video montages on three screens, having animals lead the narrative, and filming the void. Queer imagination of failure helps explain the ways in which Kum’s aesthetic choices and her lived experience intersect. Responsive to the bifurcated gender discourse that threatens the legibility of queer lives, queer failure helps to unveil the structural polarization in identity-based knowledge formation and explicate Kum’s art of failing as a means to convey a portrayal more faithful to the diasporic life of Zainichi Koreans.

Crises of Queer Midlife in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset

This article analyses Ann-Marie MacDonald’s 2014 novel Adult Onset as a text that brings the developmental literature of middle age into conversation with queer theories of temporality, family, and adulthood. Specifically, the novel invokes the narrative of the “mid-life crisis” to interrogate the concepts of queer progress and successful aging that its protagonist, a married lesbian mother and celebrated author named Mary Rose MacKinnon, outwardly embodies. Linking Mary Rose’s mid-life crisis with Jack Halberstam’s theory of “queer failure,” I argue that the text articulates a critique of the It Gets Better Project as a queer progress narrative and betrays Mary Rose’s deep ambivalence toward how her life in middle age conforms to a homonormative developmental script. At the same time, the crises of Mary Rose’s mid-life motherhood unsettle the homonormativity that appears to define her and contributes to a queering of family temporalities. Drawing upon Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways” but shifting the focus from growing up to growing old, I argue that the text brings Mary Rose into lateral relationships with other aging and old mothers in the text, both human and non-human. These lateral relationships not only offer alternatives to the concepts of progress and decline, success, and succession, which are at the root of normative conceptions of individual aging and generational time, but also move the discussion of mid-life in literature beyond anthropocentric understandings of what it means to age well in contemporary culture.

Afrofuturist Horror on the Western Frontier: Capitalism’s Reckoning and Queer Possibilities in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Abstract: As in all his films to date, Jordan Peele deftly weaves metaphor in Nope , his latest film, to critique capitalism and its white supremacist foundations. The film’s monsters include an abstracted alien and a domesticated chimpanzee gone violent and come to signify capitalism’s recalcitrant reckoning. Drawing from Black feminist studies, Afrofuturism, and queer theory’s work on utopia and potential in queer failure, Peele compels viewers to consider Black Americans’ centrality in the formation and destruction of American capitalism. What other worlds become possible in the process of the Black and queer protagonists’ survival against the Lovecraftian monster? This study examines how horror becomes a useful lens—for rethinking the role of Black people in horror, for its contribution towards more critical discussion on capitalism’s legacy and its impending collapse(s). And, most importantly, for centering and imagining decolonial futures led by queer people of color.

LIVING WITH DEMENTIA: EXPERIENCES OF LGBTQ PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Abstract Dementia is commonly conceptualized in biomedical terms as a deterioration of brain function and a subsequent loss of self. However, dementia scholars have increasingly underscored how the self of the person with dementia may be maintained through social interactions in their everyday life. This may pose specific challenges for LGBTQ people who may not be out in care settings due to fear of discrimination and whose chosen family may not be recognized by formal care providers. This paper presents preliminary findings from a qualitative study conducted in Sweden with LGBT individuals living with dementia. The project builds on policy analysis as well as semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ people with dementia, people significant to them such as partners, family and friends, and interviews with frontline care staff and managers within dementia care. The thematic analysis illustrates how experiences of living with dementia as an LGBTQ person vary depending on the progression and type of dementia, the individuals’ social support network, how open one is with their sexual orientation or gender identity, living at home or in a dementia care facility, socioeconomics, and other factors. In line with how other ageing scholars have pointed to the potentiality of queer theory to move beyond framing dementia as pathology and decline, concepts of queer time and queer failure are used here to understand the results in ways that disrupt notions of self, temporalities, normativity, subjectivity and what it means to age successfully.

Queer failure in Freddy’s Revenge and Scream, Queen! A documentary’s recuperation of Elm Street’s queer memory

ABSTRACT In this queer reading of the 1985 horror sequel Freddy’s Revenge, I use Halberstam’s theory of queer failure to interrogate cultural mechanisms that validate and invalidate a film’s memory. The 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! guides my queer celebration of Freddy’s Revenge. The movies converge to create profound, low theoretical insights into queer desire at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The essay challenges heteronormative impulses commonly used to frame a media artifact as significant and successful enough to merit investigation.

Tarrying with Trauma While Improvising Gender in Who Do You Think You Are?

Alice Munro’s 1978 collection of linked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? enacts what Lorraine York calls Munro’s theory of fiction as “tarrying with difficult emotions and knowledges.” Judith Butler’s seminal 1988 theory of gender performativity postulated that improvising gender incurs obvious and covert social punishments, but that performing gender includes the possibility of innovation. Rose, the protagonist, succumbs to and contests norms imposed on women in the southwestern Ontario township of Huron County during the 1940s to 1970s. This thesis explores Rose surviving punitive social conventions in her cultural context which are contiguous with trauma. For Rose, failure to conform is what Jack Halberstam defines as “queer failure”: it is a triumph of personal authenticity over gender essentialism and an acceptance of human imperfection. In the journey towards self-knowledge, Rose’s surviving trauma and defying gender scripts cause the “sticky affects” of shame and humiliation identified by Amelia DeFalco; the feeling that women are not afforded hope; and, in stressful situations, emotional dissociation and emotional economies, as identified by DeFalco and York. Rose’s marriage fails because of a sadomasochistic power struggle. Rose tarries with disconnection from others and from self; however, she innovates gender and subverts the intergenerational cycle of victimvictimizer by achieving a sense of community and strengthening personal authenticity, which Margaret Atwood says is, for “Munro’s women,” “an essential element, like air.”

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Is there such thing as a queer illustration practice?

This article defines and explores a set of methodologies for image-making that can be labelled as queer, based on concepts from queer and feminist theorists such as Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz or Donna Haraway. In order to do so, it builds on the author’s own artistic practice and lived experience and references the work of various artists within the fields of visual and performative arts. Amongst others, it discusses the conceptual frames of queer failure, drag as assemblage and utopian world-building and the ways in which they exist as artistic methodologies specifically within the field of image-making and illustration.

Perversity, precarity, and anxiety: tracing a ‘more precise typology’ of the affect of neuroqueer failure in an in-school research-creation project

In this paper, I draw from an in-school music research-creation project to consider the complex, racist-ableist politics of failure in the early childhood classroom. I theorise failure as it unfolds through anxiety, which I conceptualise as an affect of failure, to discuss both the perverse possibilities and perilous precarities of (neuro)queer failure. I examine two samples from an in-school research-creation project, which fail in generative yet risky ways: (1) a vocal improvisation by “Kwodwo,” whereupon I consider failure as mobilised through the racist-ableist politics of neurotypicality, disproportionality in special education, and refusal; and (2) research-creation’s transdisciplinary courting of failure through my “critical use” of electrodermal activity. Drawing from these two samples, I suggest that, in considering this special issue’s call for “bad research,” educational researchers must not only attend to those failures that sit within the successful confines of what is defensible in the academy (i.e. failure without failing), but also to the intersecting ethico-political complexity of failure.

The Apostle of Failure: Queer Refusal, the Corinthian Letters, and Paul’s Unflattering Characterization in the Acts of Thecla

Abstract This article examines the Acts of Thecla’s unflattering presentation of the character Paul, as part of the reception of Paul’s Corinthian letters into the second century. Informed by feminist and queer biblical interpretations of the Corinthian exchange, it shows how the Acts of Thecla picks up on tensions over authority with Paul’s teachings on baptism, eschatology, and sexual renunciation in its portrait of Paul. Engaging Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the article suggests that the Acts of Thecla reads Paul’s letters this way in service of the social critique and queer antagonism that it holds up for its second and third century readers. Where Halberstam claims “queer failure” as resistance to capitalist profit, reproductive futurity, and neoliberal notions of success today, here Thecla’s story is read as a narrative of refusal in its own time. Paul’s muddled encounters with Thecla, steeped in the Corinthian exchange, it concludes, are central to this ancient tale about being, and improbably surviving, outside and at the edges of imperial, civic, and familial frames.

Queer Relationalities, Impossible: The Politics of Homonationalism and Failure in LOGO’s Fire Island

ABSTRACT This essay interrogates the representation of “hot mess” gay male castmates and their interpersonal relationships in LOGO’s Fire Island’s season 1. In particular, this essay identifies moments of media constructed queer failure through which the gay male castmates are framed, not to politicize, historicize, and contextualize their interpersonal relations as possibly emerging forms of queer relationalities. In so doing, this essay overall critiques how LOGO’s Fire Island is a material product of homonationalism that colorblinds the hetero-relational paradigm as the normative social capital. The analysis is consisting of three themes; heterosexualization, whiteness, and respectability. In the end, this essay discusses the broader implications of queer relationalities that Fire Island’s season one has failed to offer.

Re-Presenting the Gender-Queer Figure

A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints was an exhibition curated by Asato Ikeda for the Royal Ontario Museum which included many prints and artifacts depicting the wakashu in Edo Japan. The wakashu, male youth who were distinguished from both adult men and women to be represented as “a third gender”, were depicted by the exhibition in conformity with contemporary queer aesthetics and trans identities. This paper explores the curatorial practices involved in the representation of the wakashu as a third gender or gender-queer figure, elucidating the many (re)appropriations involved in the production of a postcolonial queer visual imaginary. I begin by walking through Ikeda’s A Third Gender exhibition, and recounting the representational practices therein, to examine the construction of the wakashu as an essentially gendered figure and exhume the historical and cultural characteristics that are elided by this re-presentation. I then explore the incommensurability of the wakashu with contemporary queer and trans representational practices as a fundamentally queer failure, which may precipitate other affective relations with this figure that transcend our spatial and temporal differences. Finally, I question how these inappropriate/d re-presentations might produce an affective rupture within the queer visual imaginary that invites us to interrogate the postcolonial and transnational structuring of sexuality and gender.

She Bloomed in the Dark: Shadow Feminism and Queer Failure in Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

This article analyzes Paula Gunn Allen’s 1983 novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows deploying Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer failure, a subversive phenomenon that involves embracing negative affects, refusing success narratives, and negating selfhood. Refusing stereotypical feminine positionality in a masculinist universe in favor of a shadowy, female-centered spirit community, the main character, Ephanie, rejects disciplinary gender norms and fails to perform a cis-hetero feminine identity. Recasting Allen’s conception of the medicine-dyke as a Halberstamian shadow feminist, the article analyzes how the novel employs queer failure as a critique of settler colonial oppression and violence, from the main character as failed ciswoman to the novel’s narrative as a failure of form and convention. Through a fragmented narrative style that never truly resolves, the novel lacks stability and familiar structure, challenging the telos of stabile identity formation and the logic of success. Like its main character, the novel is subversive, a queer unstory that fails to adhere to literary conventions, emphasizing unbeing, undoing, and murky kinds of feminist resistance.

Trans Failure

AbstractThis article explores potentialities for experiencing trans joy via creative praxis, which the author coins “trans failure.” As the author defines it, trans failure builds on examples set by queer failure, such as casting off limiting cultural norms (like binary gender and oppressive framings of what identities should look like), and incorporates new strategies such as deploying play as a means of self-articulating beyond the bounds of what is currently available. Trans failure's use of play has a utopian impulse often achieved via alternating strategies of theatricality, pleasure, collaboration, and experimentation in a mode of enacting alternative worlds and experiencing joy. The article discusses how play, a strategic mode of trans failure, is used to intervene in consumer culture and to work toward self-articulation and the procurement of joy. First, an explanation of gender as we understand it today is sketched out. Then, issues around representations of trans constituencies are discussed as problematically informed by dominant conceptions of gender and perpetuated in mainstream consumer culture. Then two distinct contemporary projects that disrupt the space of consumer culture are analyzed, deploying what the author names a praxis of trans failure in search of creating joy.

Ways to write an academic life: Queering the academic curriculum vitae

The curriculum vitae (CV) is a short account of one’s career and qualifications typically prepared for a position or promotion. In academia, the CV chronicles a representation of the academic self in terms of scholarly activities such as publications, research grants and projects, conference participation and teaching awards. Far from being a neutral record, the CV (re)produces gendered norms and highlights continued gender inequalities in academic careers. This article explores how the CV is made possible (and consequently measured and valued) through material practices as well as via discourses of productivity, employability and success. It does this by embracing Jack Halberstam’s concept of ‘queer failure’ and Karen Barad’s theory of ‘intra-action’ in an experimental auto-ethico-ethnography of the academic CV. Using a diffractive approach, this article also calls into question the separation of the body and the materiality of the CV, our emotional relationship with the CV, as well as gendered academic labour. In theorising the CV through the lens of performativity, attention is reoriented towards the assemblage of relations and intra-actions between academic, writing, the career, the body and representation and reveals them to be complexly located within and through each other.

She’s the man: Michelle Akers ‘unruly’ game and the ‘potentiality’ of queer failure in the early development of the U.S. women’s national soccer team

ABSTRACT Michelle Akers performance at the 1991 FIFA Women’s World Championship positioned her at the centre of U.S. soccer, a sport institution historically relegated to the margins of U.S. sport for its inability to represent hegemonic versions of American masculinity. Her ‘unruly’ performance of ‘female masculinity’ embodied the notion of ‘queer failure’, a gender performance that fails to comply with dominant logics of power, but was needed in order to (re)imagine the future potential for both soccer and female athletes in U.S. sport. Akers’ queer failure helped to locate U.S. soccer, and more specifically, women’s soccer, within the centre of American sport. With this shift, however, Akers queer failure became a liability and was rendered all but invisible within an emerging postfeminist context. Akers provided a recognizable queer performance until her retirement in 1999 as she opened new space for alternative femininities and queer bodies to be visible in women’s sport.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors